There are no non-responders, how to cool in hot weather races

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

There are no non-responders

We’ve all seen those people. Maybe some of us are those people. It seems like they work so hard and they just don’t respond to the training. They just don’t get more fit. It’s so frustrating to see that person who works hard and doesn’t get results. What do you tell that person?

In the interesting study Alex Hutchinson writes about, there were non-responders in those who performed 1, 2, or 3 training sessions a week of 60 minutes each. In the 4 and 5 workouts a week group, not a single non-responder.

Even more interesting, when the non-responders returned to increase their training by 2 sessions a week, every one of them increased their fitness enough to fall out of the “non-responder” range.

In other words, they were all responders. They just needed more training time.

How to cool in hot weather races

It may seem strange to be thinking about hot weather racing in February but maybe less so with the weather we’ve had this past week.

According to this study, performance improvements came from in event cooling via facial water spray and menthol mouth rinse. Pre-cooling via cold water immersion and ice slurry ingestion didn’t help.

Other studies have suggested the pre-race cooling might help but this seems to cast some doubt on that. The good news is mid-race cooling did seem to help. While we may not have menthol mouth rinse available at our races this summer, we can do other things to help cool us down and hold out some hope that those other interventions, performed while we’re running, will help.